Dr. Nau is an AAAI Fellow (elected in 1996), and was an invited speaker at AAAI-05. He has received an NSF graduate fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, an Outstanding Faculty award, and four "best paper" awards. He co-authored the AI-planning algorithm that enabled Bridge Baron to win the 1997 world championship of computer bridge. His SHOP2 planning system won one of the top four awards in the 2002 International Planning Competition, and has been used in hundreds of projects worldwide.

Dr. Nau's research interests include AI planning and searching, and computer-integrated design and manufacturing. He has more than 250 publications (here is a list). He has taught "short courses" on his research in the US, India, Cyprus, and Italy. His bookAutomated Planning: Theory and Practice is the de facto standard textbook on automated planning.

Dr. Nau received a B.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Missouri at Rolla in 1974. He received an A.M. (in 1976) and Ph.D. (in 1979) in Computer Science from Duke University, where he was an NSF graduate fellow and a James B. Duke graduate fellow. He has had summer and/or sabbatical appointments at IBM Research, NIST, the University of Rochester, and General Motors Research Laboratories.

Dr. Nau has chaired or co-chaired several major conferences, including most recently the 2003 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). He has been a reviewer for many conferences, journals, and funding agencies. He has been on editorial boards for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and several other major journals and book series. He has been the Computer Science Department's director of graduate studies, the director of the CIM Laboratory, and the chair of the ISR Executive Committee. He currently is the Computer Science Department's webmaster and is a member of the campus senate.